


Harry Potter's Guide on How to Be a God

by mumuinc



Series: Gods and Men [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Master of Death Harry Potter, Non-Linear Narrative, The Old Ones are characters I'm making up as I go
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:08:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27077809
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mumuinc/pseuds/mumuinc
Summary: Harry was back in the land of the living, but the land of the living no longer appears to be the world that he knew and understood. For one, he didn't even know if the sort of existence he led counted as living.Not to mention if he was stepping out of the Veil of Death as himself, then who was that little critter being birthed by Lily Evans at St Mungo's?
Relationships: Sirius Black/Harry Potter
Series: Gods and Men [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1976254
Comments: 10
Kudos: 80





	Harry Potter's Guide on How to Be a God

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to a completely random sequel to _Of Gods and Men_ , the fic which required no sequel, but well, here we are.
> 
> You had to have read that fic, otherwise, this will be completely unintelligible.

The first thing he noticed when he opened his eyes upon waking up was that there were no eyes to be opened nor waking up to do. A feeling of complete and utter weightlessness, he supposed one might feel it if they were astronauts in space, or perhaps taking a gander on the moon, enveloped him in a manner that was utterly baffling as it seemed that his body no longer seemed to exist and therefore how would a sensation wrap around him if there was no body with which to feel said sensation?

Slowly, he stretched his consciousness about himself. He wasn’t quite sure where _he_ ended and his surroundings began given that he had no body or any physical demarcations of where his sense of self ended, though he was quite sure _he_ had to end somewhere and something _else_ had to begin because he couldn’t be the be all and end all of this existence. The feeling of weightlessness, of nonexistence, pervaded. If he tried to shift his consciousness to look down at his body or even his hands, he was proven right that he had no body, though he’d already known this much even before he let his consciousness take over the _un_ consciousness that was his previous state of being.

Wherever he was definitely wasn’t where he was before, and at this point he had a bit of trouble even remembering what was _before_. Had he fallen into some weird looking glass world where everything was the complete opposite of everything that he’d known before? Certainly, not having a body or physical existence was the complete opposite of how he remembered to exist, and with magic, there was just no telling what was and wasn’t possible in the world anymore. Maybe he’d accidentally Vanished himself and this was the place where Vanished things went after a successfully cast _Evanesco_ , though he thought that would be weird to still not exist in a plane of existence where Vanished things went. Wasn’t that the point of a _place_ for a Vanished things?

It was at the ponderation of this strange paradox that he slowly realized that he was not alone. There were other… beings… in the same existence. He couldn’t physically feel them, of course, given that he had no body, but his awareness stretched enough that he could feel their presence in the metaphysical sense. And they were laughing at him. Or perhaps not laughing, since there was no air for sound to travel for him to hear the sound of laughing, but he was aware of their amusement. And he was aware there was more than one other consciousness in wherever he was.

“Who’s there?” he asked somewhat trepidatiously. Not having a mouth or a throat with which to push sound and convey tone was a little difficult, especially as he hadn’t particularly wanted to sound like he was afraid, but that was how the words seemed to… leak out of himself.

The amusement hanging in the nothingness between him and whoever else was there with him seemed to thicken. If he concentrated, he could almost tell them apart. There were at least three that he could feel (though again, feel was not the right word, but existing somewhere where things didn’t physically exist weren’t typically known to humans like him so there really was no sort of descriptor to indicate what it was his awareness was telling him, and so he had to make do with words that made sense to what he knew instead of trying to adapt what he’d known to this utterly unfamiliar, unknown new world, and wasn’t that how it was when he discovered that there was such a thing as magic back when he was eleven anyway?)

“It wakes,” one of the entities said, or rather made known since there was no air to make voice or sound possible, whatever. He was tired of trying to suit words and thought to actual reality.

He could feel his feathers start to get ruffled with the constant having to correct his own internal monologue about how he understood things as they happened, and now with the almost derisive smugness he could feel at the words the _others_ had just uttered.

“I am not an _it_ ,” he responded petulantly.

A titter went up among his audience. Now he could really start to piece them all apart. There were indeed three of them, though he could sense that there had to be more, though that was the extent that he could identify each of the three apart. The Others having no voice or physicality, he couldn’t determine anything else that would differentiate one from the other apart from there being three distinct entities.

“The youngling has difficulty understanding what it is it has become,” said one of the other two entities that had so far not spoken.

There was a huff of annoyance, though really it could have been anything, he was really just choosing to interpret the tickle in his awareness as it would translate into sound and that distinctly felt put out. “Stop baiting the poor boy,” said the third entity, and this one he recognized, because he was certain he’d heard, or at least _felt_ , that interaction before, though he couldn’t quite determine from where.

“What’s going on here? Where am I?” he asked, not wanting to play any more into the mildly derisive amusement of his companions, and then he thought about his situation some more. “ _What_ am I?”

“Ah,” said the first speaker, “now it asks the right questions.” He felt more than saw that this entity was moving closer, almost brushing against the boundaries of where his awareness ended. “Do you know what it is you’ve achieved, little mortal?” The entity didn’t allow him to answer. “Do you know that you’ve achieved what no mortal soul had ever hoped to accomplish in the eons that you flesh-locked creatures have walked your earth?”

“What—“

He didn’t get to finish that thought for the third speaker, the one whose “voice” he recognized, cut him off. “We cut to the chase so to speak, Master.”

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting but being called anyone’s Master certainly wasn’t it. And if he hadn’t been utterly flabbergasted by the address, he would have been completely bowled by the sudden popping into existence of a physicality in the plane of nothingness. The third speaker fashioned himself a body—pale skin, long limbs, blond and pointy features. Utterly naked, for it seemed clothing meant nothing to these creatures who appeared to have no need for bodies or any manner of physical demarcation of their selves. He would have blushed at the sight of the casual nakedness if he even had a body to blush with, but that wasn’t what shocked him the most.

“M—Malfoy?”

The third speaker smiled, an arrangement of thin, pale features that took away the severity of the face he’d assumed. “So you still remember.”

The second entity snorted. “That’s no good. A tether to the physical world is the undoing of our existence, brother.”

“It isn’t a tether so much as--familiarization,” said the one who had Draco Malfoy’s body. (He had to wonder to himself how he’d known who this body belonged to, because he didn’t seem to be aware of what he’d been _before_ , only that he’d been alive, well, mostly alive, and that at some point, he probably had known who this blond, pointy person was.) “The boy was a mortal, Gaia, he would only understand our existence in the same ways mortals, with their puny little minds, understand the concept of the Old Ones.”

“That’s such a droll name for what we are, Thanatos,” said the third speaker. Once more, he was taken by surprise as the entity clothed itself in an outfit of skin, flesh and bone, this time, that of another unmistakably male figure, with black hair, long, slender limbs, and an easy sort of grace.

“Sirius?!”

“Stop baiting him, I said, Eros,” Thanatos snapped, and suited action to words by attempting to reform the body the one called Eros had taken into another. Eros stubbornly stuck to his form.

“Do you remember who you were, youngling?” Eros asked, a distinct aura of mischievousness surrounding his smiling naked form.

He tried to rein in the sudden upshot of ire that pulsed from the center of whatever it was that he was. “I know you’re stealing the body of someone I love and I’d appreciate if you didn’t.”

“Look, the youngling knows what it’s about!” said Gaia, still bodiless and amorphous, merrily, and to his horror, it was right: somehow, with the tingle of righteous anger in the middle of his core, he’d somehow fashioned a physicality for himself in the form of a body, distinctly male, tan-skinned and thin, and modestly clothed in the outfit he remembered wearing—a starched white shirt, pressed black trousers, a tie undone at his neck. He touched knobby fingers to his face and if he tried to force his awareness outside of the physical form he’d accidentally conjured for himself, he knew he had a long slightly crooked nose, like it had been broken before and not quite healed right, thin lips, a square jaw, wide, deepset green eyes, and a shock of messy black hair, streaked with a few strands of grey. Wait—this wasn’t how he remembered—

“My name is Harry Potter, I’m thirty six years old, and I’m wizard,” he tried to tell himself, and instantly, it was true. The tan knobby fingers matured from the spindly coltish thinness of teenage boy into that of a man. He could feel the appearance of crow’s feet and smile lines cracking along the surface of smooth tan skin, messy black hair lengthening, a moustache and beard sprouting over his upper lip, cheeks and jaws. His eyes—he had eyes now!—squinted with the myopia he knew was a trait inherited from his father, and he felt around in his pockets and found round, metal-rimmed glasses and shoved it over his face. He could feel his awareness stretching with the heavy weight of memory flooding back into him.

“Very good,” said Eros, still wearing Sirius’ naked body. Harry scowled and stared hard at the naked form of teenage boy and slowly, Eros morphed into a different body one Harry didn’t know so intimately or held so dear. He clothed him in nondescript black wizard robes so he didn’t have to look at his naked body, and then turned to do the same to Thanatos. He didn’t really need to see a Draco Malfoy naked, no matter how attractive Malfoy had been in life, and Thanatos wasn’t Malfoy anyway. He was, like Harry remembered, just borrowing Malfoy’s form, something which Harry had plenty to say about, though he was aware this might not be the right time to debate the ethics of body snatching.

Thanatos looked down at the flow of linen black robes around him and frowned. “This is very ungainly.”

“Having a body is ungainly,” said Gaia with a snort. “And no, youngling. You are not doing to me what you have done to Eros and Thanatos. I am not a creature you wish to bound in physicality, for I _am_ physicality.”

Harry frowned, confused. “What? Wait, are you—are you some sort of gods?”

Thanatos laughed, the sound rich and dark and nothing at all like the nasal wheezing sound that usually issued out of Malfoy’s thin mouth whenever he laughed, and Harry had heard Malfoy laugh in his adulthood so few times that he could distinctly recall exactly how the other man had sounded. “Gods, he calls us. I like that one.”

“Well, if you two didn’t call us these ridiculous names, it might not have gotten the wrong idea,” Eros said with a droll flap of thin, manicured hands. The form Harry had given him was a dark-skinned androgyne, handsome but nondescript, so he wouldn’t try to steal another person’s body from Harry’s memories. He looked at Harry now with his nondescript dark eyes, glittering with a depth of knowledge that Harry could not hope to imagine to understand. “We are not gods, youngling, for that presupposes that we existed before mortals do.” He smiled thinly. “No, we are what you may call the Old Ones, for we have existed for as long as your collective human memory, but not as long as Time.”

“Be glad you’re not meeting Time,” Gaia said sagely. “It is a hopelessly pedantic creature, Time, as old as Chaos, it is.”

Thanatos raised his hands placatingly. “Now, we all agreed we wouldn’t involve Time or Chaos. Gaia, you’re here because we need you. Harry understands our existence in terms of physicality and he won’t be able to grasp—“

“What, Death and Love without Existence?” Harry interrupted, annoyed by the cryptic discussions of the metaphysical. He wasn’t here to debate on anything, least of all the existence of Death and Love without Existence, for everyone certainly believed that Death and Love could exist in the vacuum of Existence and exist on planes of pure thought. “No, stop. I want you to explain what all this is.”

“ _All this_?” Gaia asked archly and it seemed to call forth something that populated the nothingness through which the three physical forms of Thanatos, Eros and Harry occupied, a something that pulsed to life, shot red and pink and gold and white and all colors and none, encapsulating the boundaries of his awareness, which at that moment, seemed utterly limitless, and bounding it into a dome of pulsing warmth. It felt almost like he existed in a mother’s womb, and _that,_ Harry thought, ought to be severely fucked up if he was indeed a thirty-six year old wizard.

“All this,” said Gaia, and now it—she, though Harry wasn’t too into the idea of gendering concepts such as existence, but Gaia seemed distinctly _other_ from him, and if he was male and aging and magical, then perhaps it stood to personify Existence as female, ageless and fathomless—called forth her own personification of herself: indeed a woman of indeterminate age, distinct but outlandish features: white hair, black eyes, her skin milky white but distinctly not flesh-like. It appeared as if she were made of marble, a moving, living statue. She was beautiful and terrifying at the same time. “All this is what you are now, little mortal.”

“Perhaps not so mortal anymore,” said Eros. “No mortal could hope to move from death and into the realm of the Old Ones, when mortals are destined for afterlife.”

“So this isn’t the afterlife?” Harry asked, somehow already knowing the answer.

“No,” said Gaia. “As Eros said, this is the realm of the Old Ones, what you mortals want to think of as gods or concepts, for the atheist among you. I suppose a concept is what we are closest to, as humans very rarely worship anything except money and death, and Thanatos is hardly worth the adulation.”

“Thank you for such an erudite explanation for what I am,” Thanatos said drily. “I would say it is hardly my fault that humans find the mystery of death far more engaging than that of Life and Love. Humans are small-minded and foolish and we certainly wouldn’t exist if they were capable of any depth of true imagination.”

Gaia snorted. “Speak for yourself. This poor, unknowing soul would not be lost among us if it weren’t for your foolishness granting wagers with insipid humans, and then ultimately getting bested by them.”

Eros smirked at Thanatos. “You have to admit, our sister is right. If you hadn’t created those blasted Death artifacts, young Harry here would be in a happily ever afterlife instead of slumming it here with us.”

Thanatos scowled. “It’s hardly an imposition to be the Master of Death. Think, little man!” he cried, turning to Harry, his grey eyes shining with ambition that for a moment, it was almost as if Harry was looking into the real Draco Malfoy’s eyes, so awash was the face before him with the expression of how he remembered Draco in his youth: ambitious and unafraid to admit to it. “For years of your petty little human life, you’ve lamented that you’ve never had the agency to determine the flow of your own human life. Now you do, and more!”

“What human, whose core is goodness and not that wicked propensity to worship money and death, would want such power over another?” Eros said scathingly. “No, Thanatos, you are not corrupting this soul as you’ve corrupted so many others in their lifetimes. Their fear of _you_ is what turns these little fleshy creatures of Gaia into the abominations you keep in the folds of those conjured robes you wear.”

“I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with a fear of death,” Harry blurted out, not quite wanting to get into another long draw out argument.

“You say that now,” said Gaia, “but surely, you remember how you came to be here, human? Did you not aid Death in the capture of a soul so fearful of him that he dared tamper with the essence of his existence, to the point he has become unrecognizable? The creature you once knew as Lord Voldemort, or Tom Riddle, however his insipid little mind chose to refer to himself, feared Death so much that he is no longer even recognizably human.”

“Bad karma,” Eros threw in, voice annoyingly chipper. “He doesn’t exist anymore. Tearing your essence, or soul as you humans like to refer to it, results in its inevitable destruction. And once you destroy the essence, then it stands to reason you no longer exist.”

“Foolish creature that he is,” Thanatos interrupted, “Tom Riddle was an outlier, and Harry is the champion that brought him down. I think it’s only right we grant him entry into our realm, especially since he is now the Master.”

“The Master of _you_ , maybe,” Gaia sniffed.

Harry couldn’t believe how unbelievably petty these… these creatures could be. He remembered Professor Sinistra’s lectures on the Greco-Roman gods from which the constellations were derived, and the long-winded discussions late at night with Sirius, for these were the inspiration for many names within the Black family. The gods of myth were utterly petty in those stories as well.

“Bah,” Thanatos scoffed. “The Master of Death transcends Life and Existence, and you know it. Why else would Harry end up here?”

“Because of your stupidity,” Gaia said caustically.

“Oh, stop squabbling,” Eros muttered. “The youngling is here and there’s little we can do for no amount of power-mongering between the two of you is going to change that. Its presence run counter to the rules of our worlds, but we already know that rules are a bit more like… guidelines.”

“Are we really ripping off Disney movies now?” Harry asked apropos of nothing. “Look, I don’t really want to be here, and it sounds like none of you want me to be here—“

“That’s not true!” Thanatos cried, and he looked so much like a teenage Draco Malfoy about to indulge in a strop that Harry snorted. “Look, I know I sort of—sprung this on you. No, don’t look at me like that! It wasn’t even me but that meddling old fool who likes to pretend he’s a mentor when he really knows nothing, but you’re here now, and Gaia and Eros need to play nice, or I’m calling Chaos, and then no one will have any toys left in the sandbox.”

“I’m hardly a toy!” Harry said fiercely.

Thanatos merely flapped an uncaring hand at him. “Semantics, boy. What matters is that you _are_ , and oh, we’re going to have so much fun!”

Gaia rolled her eyes. “For an ancient, Old being, you are surprisingly juvenile.” She smiled at Harry in a way that both made him feel warm and curdled the juices in his belly. “But he is right. You _are_ here, and there shall be no going back.”

“No?” Harry said suddenly, remembering that this wasn’t what he wanted, not how he was choosing to end his story. “No going back? No, I don’t think so.”

The three Old Ones looked among themselves, an unfathomably aged expression entering their unknowable faces, but Harry dug his feet in. No, there was no way he was accepting that this was the end, that this was the eternity he had to suffer, had to endure. He’d endured unbearable challenges and trials in his mortal life. That wasn’t going to be the case in his death, if it was the last thing he would do in the span of an eternity.

* * *

The realm of the Old Ones, as it turned out, was completely malleable to the whims and desires of the creatures that dwelt in it. Harry was later to know that Life, Death and Love were but a few of a myriad other such creatures, and in the small eternity of the Valley of Death, as he had come to call the existence where he dwelt, the world was a constant flux of warring intentions: creation and order as Gaia imposed her essence, tumult, upheaval and mayhem disrupting the order whenever Chaos graced them with its presence, nothingness when Thanatos was feeling particularly vindictive, and an unending, interminable stillness when Time exerted its considerable influence.

None of the Old Ones were particularly thrilled at the presence of a human soul that somehow had made it to the Valley of Death as opposed to the afterlife of human souls, except perhaps Thanatos, who true to Gaia’s observation, behaved a little like a child let loose in a candy store. No one wanted the trouble of having to personify themselves in order for Harry to wrap his finite mortal consciousness around what they represented. Moreover, his presence seemed to make Chaos particularly difficult to reign in as it wreaked havoc and destruction everywhere it appeared, not just in the Valley of Death. Harry was the personification of Chaos made manifest. His existence should not have occurred and yet here he was, an anomaly to the functions of Life and Death.

Later, he was to know that his existence in the Valley mirrored a similar sort of Chaos reigning on the world he’d left behind when he discovered the edges of the nothingness that bound the limits of the Valley of Death. Once again, it was a paradox, for how could nothingness, which was infinite, be bound by an edge, much less a river, as these edges appeared to him? Gaia was in too much of a strop to explain; she’d retreated to the other side of the river to exact her esoteric brand of magic, creating life frenetically, and Harry watched the images of her touch reflect in the scintillating waters of the river as he sat by the edge.

They took shape in the form of the life he had left behind: James and Lily, alive and well and endlessly in love with each other. It was evident his parents were touched by both Gaia and Eros, for as he watched in the endless flow of time, they came together—and Harry had to turn away here; he really didn’t want to witness his parents getting intimate or anything—and in the interminable, circular march of Time in the Valley—Lily fell pregnant.

In the occasional ripple, he would see Remus, alone and friendless, his lycanthropy bared to the wider wizarding world, shunned by society, and by his friends because Sirius could not bear the sight of him without being reminded that Harry had exchanged his life to return Remus to his human form.

He saw Lucius and Narcissa, themselves agents of Love and Chaos if the caterwauling of Druella Black upon learning that her youngest daughter had been knocked up by the Malfoy heir while she was still at Hogwarts were to be believed. He saw Rosier and Avery and Snape, all still alive but no longer holding the ominous promise of becoming Death Eaters.

And always, always when he looked beyond the Valley of Death, he saw Sirius. Beautiful, elegant, utterly depressed Sirius, who threw himself into the very thing he expected never to have done with his life and became Lord Black, who donned the grey robes of the Unspeakables, who shut himself up in the depths of the Ministry of Magic, haunting the room of the Veil of Death, for it was the closest that he could feel Harry’s presence. Sirius was beyond gifted in magical theory. He may not have known what the archway at which he spent so much of his time studying truly was, but he evidently could feel in his blood and in his bones, the nearness of the Valley of Death, of the Valley of Gods.

Harry watched as Sirius stood before the archway, looking almost longingly at the flutter of the Veil. His grey eyes had a faraway expression, as if he were hearing music only his ears could pick up, and that was probably true. Harry remembered what the Veil had been like in the timeline he came from before he appeared in this Sirius’ timeline. He watched, transfixed as Sirius closed his eyes, his face going blank, before he turned away, disappointed once more for the way his life had turned out, for living a world where everyone got their happy ending except him.

Harry stared into the gently flowing waters as it carried the image of Sirius out of the Department of Mysteries, and up into the muggle world above, where he moved like a ghost that didn’t belong in the world of the living. His heart ached for his godfather. While he was not imprisoned in Azkaban in this timeline, it seemed he’d imprisoned himself in his own depression. Slowly, he reached, as if to pluck the image of the beautiful man who traversed the world in the river as if it were made of dust.

“Don’t.”

At the sound of Thanatos’ voice, Harry pulled his hand back, unaware that he’d nearly touched the waters. Thanatos stared at him with Draco’s ageless face.

“I wasn’t—“

Thanatos shook his head. “You were. Happens to the best of us, which is why you really ought to be taking Gaia’s advice and letting go of your earthly tethers.”

Harry snorted. “Easier said than done.”

“You loved him,” Thanatos said quietly, nodding. “Did you know, Master, that once upon a time, the Old Ones themselves were creatures of a simpler constitution?” He drew Harry up, away from the river and led him to a rapidly coalescing figure of a massive willow tree, similar to the Whomping Willow, whereupon they sat beneath the gently drooping boughs. It was so strange to be in Thanatos’ presence, especially when he looked like Harry’s childhood nemesis and later sometime colleague.

“Let me tell you a story of a boy I once knew,” Thanatos said, his voice soft and lilting like a song, and for all Harry wanted to break away and resume his voyeuristic endeavor of watching Sirius as he meandered mindlessly through his life, shackled by loss and crippling depression, he found himself ensnared by the hypnotism of Thanatos’ voice.


End file.
